Think you know which ones were the winners? They’re all the subject lines in the first (A) column. In general, we found that:

Subject lines with company names in them did better, and they did better when the company name was near the beginning of the subject line (perhaps it was the increased recognition factor)

Shorter subject lines seemed to work better than long subject lines (the difference in open rate was more noticeable when they differed by 30 characters)

How Much Better Are A/B Tested Email Campaigns?

We compared the email marketing stats of A/B testers against the average email marketing stats across all MailChimp customers.

Average open rate across all lists: 21.7%
Average open rate for winning A/B groups: 24.1%

Average click rate across all the lists: 4.7%
Average click rate for winning A/B groups: 5.5%

*We analyzed 1,720 A/B tested campaigns, sent to 6,226,331 inboxes (we filtered down to emails sent to over 500 recipients).

As you can see, those who take the time to A/B split test their email campaigns get better overall results than those who don’t. For some extremely large lists, those few percentage points can make a huge difference in eyeballs, clicks and conversions.